Netartist Jon Rafman’s Kool-Aid Man avatar is one of his primary characters, taking appointments and leading tours through Second Life worlds both utopian and fetishistic, as well as starring in still images and films directed by Rafman himself, which humorously contrast the avatar’s round red body with the super-sexy alter egos more commonly seen in Second Life. He speaks with Lindsay Howard about his work here.

In the process of this course, and from experience gained while playing Aion, I’ve found that much of the play in MMOGs could almost be considered multi-player if we were to place them on a console system pre-dating Xbox live and Playstation network.

Even from the early levels co-operative play is encouraged through many quests in order to make it easier for players to achieve the goal and survive through it’s entirity. This is of course most obvious through the guild system, which if caught onto early enough in the game can be of a huge help to the noobs and other low level players trying to complete the early quests, or negotiate the PvP zones.

On the other hand, I, like many other new player I encountered, did not manage to find my way into a legion until after the main low level quests. Initially this was a problem, repeatedly dying as I tried to time my runs with those around me, until I discovered the ability to make groups. It seems these impromptu groups, sometimes led by a higher level or more experienced avatar, and a common feature in many MMOGs, are genuine life savers for noobs in these runs; the collective play they demand ensures everyone makes it through to complete the quest.

For me these groups not only got me through the quest but also found me high level contacts and taught me skills I would need to play my class in the future. Did any one else find that as a guild free player these groups were around to help or is it a chance event?

After hours of downloading and waiting, I finally got to register and create my avatar from the options that I was provided with…gender, race, type, hair style, skin colour, piercings, type of face. Then finally, giving my avatar a name -Evelynna – human rogue.

I tried to make my avatar look as close to me as I possibly could because it is essentially me in the virtual world. When in ‘in world’ and interacting with other players, I don’t try to be someone else. It’s tough to do in the long run…your true personality always comes through somehow.

After I clicked on ‘enter world’, my screen went black. After a few seconds I arrive in world…There were trees around me, green lush grass everywhere, infected wolfs walking around and players slaying them. I didn’t do much; I mostly walked around, explored the area, and watched other players do their quests or raids.

I figured out how manoeuvre my avatar around the world, how to jump, move forward, move backward move the camera to a different angle using the mouse or the keys. I also figured how to chat, how to send whispers although on the trial version I can only send whispers to players who have me on their friend’s list, I was kind of disappointed, I was also not able to yell on trial version. I guess they would have restrictions on trial versions. But I was fooling around with some of the other things you can do like wave, act shy, blow a kiss, salute, dance, etc which I thought was kind of neat. I tried them all and I’m pretty sure everyone around me thought I was crazy.

Trying to ask a question is difficult, because you can be standing there for hours yelling your question out but no one will stop to answer. Some players simply walk away when you ask them for help or they’d just laugh at you and run away.

To complete my “day in the life of my avatar” blog, I want to explain my last day in my virtual world before my subscription expired. This last day of being in World of Warcraft is representative of daily life events because it is a representation of what I had achieved that far. I did not become an expert in World of Warcraft as I only reached level 30 (maximum level is 80 I believe), but I did enjoy playing and exploring in a fantasy world and leveling due to personal achievements.

Once logged into my account on World of Warcraft, I rez into focus. I am a female night elf hunter. Before even moving anywhere I attend to housekeeping activities which I do every time I log on to WoW. The first thing I do is check my item bags.

As seen in the screenshot above, I check all of my items to see what I had last had to see what I can sell. I never discovered how to use the auctioneer to sell items (nor did I want to figure it out, like many other confusing things in this game), I always sold items the first thing to vendors to cash in my rewards to obtaining certain items. Each of the bags I had for items were organized into categories. The categories helped me when in battle so I knew exactly where to find a potion or a healing power to access it quicker, as battling is all about efficiency, for me anyway. One bag held potions or bandages that would heal my character in battles or after a battle. One bag held quest items. Quest items are items which are used to fulfill quests, which can be found, taken from dead enemies, or given to my character by computer characters whom a character accepts quests from.

The screenshot above shows the computer character Feero Ironhand who wishes to reward me for protecting him as he delivers supplies to another computer player. More on quests will appear later on in this post. The other two bags hold random items found during battles and other miscellaneous items that may help my character in battle. The final bag is for pet food. Hunters in World of Warcraft have pets which act as tanks in battles. Just as your own health points decrease when attacked, so do a hunters pet health points. For some reason I do not have a screen shot of my pet, but it is a cat, a snow leopard. I make sure that my pet’s health is up to par and then I continue on with my day.

The list of objectives seen in the above screen shot to the right hand side is the list of quests I have logged into doing at the moment. Since WoW is a very large world, quests can be done just about anywhere. Some involve your character travelling across the whole countryside to complete, which is why my character has many built up, as I had not explored the entire world of Aseroth at this point (and probably never will).

In order to complete my research for our final project, I often teamed up with other players who were doing similar quests. We would help each other out by levelling or helping kill an enemy. This is when I got most of my research for our final project, while enjoying the game-play of WoW.

The above screen shot is the map of the current location my character is in. Yellow question marks and the numbered locations show where my character can accept quests, and where I can complete quests. The more quests your character completes, the more experience points your character receives, therefore it is important to do as many quests as possible to level up and become stronger. On a normal day such as this one, I checked my map to see which accepted quests were closest to me to complete.

There are many different ways to travel around the world of Azeroth. Currently, as seen in the first screen shot, my character is on a mount which is a sabre tooth tiger. It was my first and only mount, and was much faster at travelling around the vast amount of landscape that I had discovered to that date. Other ways of travel are by boat, and by hyppogryph.

The above screen shot is my character riding the hyppogryph to the next destination. The next destination is a small town called Astranaar. In Astranaar I was just selling items to vendors when, I was attacked and killed. Since I still consider myself a n00b (all I know is how to quest and level, power gamer much?) I’m not actually sure how this villain killed me, but he did, which created awesome opportunity for screen shots.

These two screen shots depict what my character looks like dead. The first one is what my character looks like dead before it’s spirit is released, and the second one is what the world looks like once a character is a spirit or a ghost. Once a character releases its spirit, it’s starting point is at the nearest graveyard. In order to resurrect your character, you must find your character’s body as a spirit and then once in a range of your body, you can resurrect yourself with a little bit of damage done to your health. Since it was my final day playing the game, I thought it was a foreshadowing of my character once I stopped playing. Instead of leaving my character for dead, the last screen shot I took was of my body resurrected, yet invisible to enemies with the last player to kill me in the background. A little sinister, but a great shot.

Overall I enjoyed playing World of Warcraft. I don’t think I would have ever played it if I hadn’t of taken this course. But now when I hear people talking about WoW or other online massively multi player games, I can chime in with my own experience, and prove that it is not just geeks who play these games. Or am I now a geek?

As part of my contribution to our group project, I had decided to look into Lord of the Rings Online. I knew several people that played the game already and all spoke highly of it so it had been on my radar for some time. This course and its recent change from a subscription model to free-to-play with micro-transactions provided the impetus for me to finally get around to checking the game out. Sadly, it wasn’t until after a 7 hour download time. 10 gigabytes of data takes a long time to download.

Setup was uneventful and within minutes of install I was in the game and creating a new character. Each character class and race has a little in game video to provide you with some information on their strengths and weaknesses although it was a little disappointing to see just how low resolution these videos were. In the end I wound up with a Human Guardian; a basic tank style warrior who focuses on defensive abilities.

I’m not new to this style of game, so it took only a few moments to familiarize myself with the controls and I was soon off exploring the starting area. The first thing that got me was the number of people around and the weird disconnect with the lack of sound. This was the oddest thing I ran into. Seeing so many people, but not being able to hear any of them makes the game world feel dead. The chat box was full of people asking questions and chatting, but text doesn’t replace sound for drawing you into the game.

After a few hours the main experience I took away is that no matter what game you are playing, the tutorial quests are always boring. “Go kill 30 spiders for me!” is not my idea of good quest design, especially when it is repeated ad nauseum with varying creatures replacing the spiders. I had to get out of that area and find something more interesting to do! It was time to graduate from the starter area.

The capstone quest was more entertaining as plot related quests tend to be, but what was really interesting was what happened as soon as I re-entered the world. Two people were just finishing a fight so I stopped to watch. Soon enough it ended and the two players went their separate ways, one off into the distance and the other straight to me to challenge me to a fight! My opponent was the same level so I was feeling moderately confident that I could beat him. I accepted his challenge. It was going quite well until he healed himself, something I had yet to figure out how to do as I hadn’t found need of it yet. I lost, but my opponent congratulated me on a good fight and went off in search of more people to fight. It was an odd experience.

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the next couple hours as I found myself performing more menial tasks and killing X numbers of Y enemies for people I didn’t care about. At one point I found myself wandering in a forest and stumbled upon a bandit camp that would have been beyond what I could handle alone. A passing Hunter offered to join me. He was considerably above my level, so he ended up killing most of the enemies while I did what I could to help out. With the area cleared, we headed back to the nearest village when he stopped me and made an offer of gear to help me out. Free stuff is free stuff, so I took him up on his offer. He had stuff that was of no use to him, but was still considerably above the level of equipment I had at the time, even if the pants looked kinda fuzzy and were bright neon orange. After passing me this bounty of goods, he parted with an offer to look him up when I leveled up some more when I could finally start running skirmishes, which were instanced combat zones.

After his departure I looked at the clock and realized just how long I had played and decided it was time to quit for the day. It was moderately fun while it lasted, but I really couldn’t see myself paying monthly for such an experience and didn’t touch the game again until a month later when I had to get down to the business of finding people who were willing to be interviewed for the group project.

I had thrown myself into the game, but unlike the kings of man, I was not tempted by thoughts of power and riches. Turbine’s one game client to rule them all just didn’t have the same magical pull to keep me interested past that first day.

When I log in to EVE Online at the beginning of a long and potentially gruelling session I try to learn something new that I didn’t know about the game already. Since I know very little, finding such things is not normally a hard endeavour and more often than not, they are very obvious to even slightly seasoned players. Today I logged in and learned that each station has its own separate storage. Therefore you cannot access items stored in any given space station from another station. Lame. I then link up with my corp-mates who are online and we decide what we want to do today. We decide to go into a few low sec areas and see if we can stir up some trouble…..just for the heck of it. Actually just for the potentially massive amounts of minable materials available in the various asteroid belts in these low sec systems. There is significant risk involved with this mission but we are a mining corporation; what else would we risk getting blown out of the sky for?

Keep in mind I am a noob when it comes to EVE. In fact, EVE is my first MMO experience altogether. Most of what I did this day was a result of my far more experienced corp-mates telling me what to do. As such when all five of us decided to enter the first system they asked that I stay behind and jump in last to avoid getting pwned by the lurking gang of NPC pirates we knew was just on the other side of the stargate. To all of our surprise, when the stronger players jumped in there were no pirates to be found. I joined them and we made a beeline for the asteroid belts. There were no pirates there either. Strange. We mined the belts until we could carry no more, dropped off our load and then repeated. Many times. Each time we found no pirates. It was incredibly tedious. The other players made comments about how some pirates were so high level-wise that they could wipe out are entire flotilla without thinking. We saw none.

We came to one of the last systems we were going to raid. In the first asteroid belt we found our first NPC pirates. One of the strongest of us, lets call him MinerFreddy, destroyed them easily. I never saw any actual combat. However, in the next belt we found a lurking PvPer who had a massive ship and an obviously large amount of firepower. He destroyed three of us including MinerFreddy within the space of five seconds. Surprisingly, I managed to warp out and seek refuge in the system’s station. We reconvened after the PvPer had left which took a great deal of travel time. Actually, this entire day I have described to you so far was easily composed of at least 75% travel time. EVE is HUGE. Getting from place to place takes planning and patience.

Fortunately, my task in my group was to explore grinding/playbour in EVE. I picked the right game. I know have a wealth of data on pretty much nothing but player thoughts, feelings and examples of grinding.

So last week I changed game servers to give the other race on Aion a go, and I thought I’d write the day in the life for both.

For those who haven’t played Aion before, presumably the majority of people reading, there are only 2 races; the Asmodians, who generally appear to be the ‘darker’ race and inhabit a landscape dominated by blues and greys and large Avatar-esque glowing creatures, and the Eylos who are considered the ‘lighter’ race and inhabit a slightly more ‘idyllic’ looking landscape dominated by green and trees which on the whole appears generally less menacing and more appealing, if you ignore the large number of things which try to kill you including some overly aggressive mushrooms.

(insert screenshots if I have them)

One of the major skills to master in Aion is flight. Given my Asmodian is a slightly higher level; this was the biggest task I had before I could progress much further into the game. As it turns out, it was a lot harder than I expected. Mostly the time on the game was filled with near death experiences and swearing at any combination of the laptop, the interface, the character, or the flow of time; some of the tasks are quite hard to finish in a minute for a relative noob. It means you learn to use the art of freefalling until just before hitting the floor. It’s a perfectly sound technique until you realise you moved the camera view to see anything useful when flying. In which case, let the rage commence. Again.

As I roam through online games asking people questions about there avatars and play experience, I find on average an avatar really does tend to reflect a person’s personality. For example in WoW I have found players with outward appearance as threatening tended to be not as open to answering questions or helping me as a noobie. But a character in my race/class or toons appearing less threatening were likely to help me. Though there were some exceptions.